Imposition and Phantom Tail Syndrome

[jonoghue]

OMG, i'm in the community again after a long time xD

 

I wanna talk about something, i had been doing a phantom wolf/fox ears a year ago but after 3 or 4 days, I left it (I forget why I did that).

 

But today, I remember the PTS and now I'm decided to do it without leaving it as before. I started today at 1:00 AM before sleep, all this day i have been focused in my wolf/fox ears while i was in school and in my home, I have a strange sensation in my head, it's not very intense and I can barely feel it only if I concentrate on the ears, I think I'm doing it right, I hope to have my complete ears in the following days. And when i get it, i'll make a guide/tutorial in english and spanish (my natal language).

And a silly question, How long it would take to make a phantom limb? I know that it depends of the person but i'm asking for a estimate...

 

Also, i hope to revive this thread because is very interesting ^^

 

Good luck, i've tried many times only to give up for lack of progress. hope you have more luck with it than me.

as i understand it, it's better to imagine that the ears are already there as opposed to trying to create them. unfortunately there's very little information online as to how to actually do it, since for most therians/otherkin/whatever people who experience this it seems to "just happen". Most likely from overactive imagination and/or species dysphoria.

 

hope to see this thread continue after so long

[jack492]

I've been trying to get a phantom tail and ears for about a month now and i'm assuming that i must be doing something wrong. i can only partially feel them from time to time but nothing else. i would really appreciate if anyone could give me some tips on doing this.

 

(EDIT: before i even started trying i already could sort of feel them.)

[NekoiNemo]

(EDIT: before i even started trying i already could sort of feel them.)

Which means there was no change?

[sushi]

jack, if you haven't already, check out FurMorphed. They have much more information about phantom tails and ears than we do. They also have some hypnosis files that become available after you post ten times.

[jack492]

Which means there was no change?

 

it got slightly stronger but nothing else. :/

[sushi]

So I recently bought Phantoms in the Brain, by V.S. Ramachandran -- the leading expert on phantom limbs. I wanted to post some of what I'm getting from the book, and maybe get this conversation started again.

 

Ramachandran is a neurologist. If you see psychology as working with the software of the brain, neurology works with the hardware. This is important because a good deal of phantom limb syndrome seems to be a hardware problem.

 

A lot of this is connected to the Penfield homunculus, so I'm going to post a picture of it here.

 

[hidden][/hidden]

 

Basically this guy named Penfield would stimulate different parts of the brain with an electrode, and he found that there's a vertical strip running down the brain on both sides that is basically a map of the body. When part of this strip is stimulated, the person feels it in a certain part of their body.

 

Now this relates to phantom limbs because within hours of amputation, the brain starts remapping. When someone loses their left arm, for example, the brain quickly realizes that the arm is gone and tells the neighboring parts of the brain that they can move into that space. So the part of that strip of the brain that used to be for the left arm and hand is now taken up by the neighboring part -- the face.

 

Ramachandran experimented by lightly touching an amputee's face with a Q-tip. When he touched certain parts of the cheek, the man felt the touch both on his cheek and also on his phantom hand. Ramachandran was able to draw a map of which part of the cheek corresponded with which part of the missing hand.

 

If you look at that homunculus again, you'll notice that just as the arm and hand are right next to the face, the leg is right next to the genitals (which are labeled, but not drawn). When Ramachandran published his findings on the Q-tip experiment, he started getting calls from leg amputees who felt their phantom leg during sex -- one man said that sex was far better now, because he could feel his orgasm through his entire phantom leg, rather than localized in his genitals as it had been before amputation.

 

Ramachandran suggests that this close relationship between the genitals and the feet might explain foot fetishes. Also, women who have had mastectomies often feel their phantom nipple when their earlobe is stimulated. (You won't see the ear or the nipple in the picture I posted, but apparently they're next to each other.) Ramachandran suggests that might be why some people enjoy having their earlobes nibbled.

 

Ramachandran suggests that this may be the cause of phantom limb pains as well -- it's an error in the mapping, where one sensation mistakenly gets remapped as the wrong sensation, so a soft breeze on the cheek could be agony in the phantom arm.

 

This sort of thing doesn't happen only in amputation though. People who have suffered damage to auditory nerves often experience gaze tinnitus -- a ringing in their ears, but only when their eyes are looking in a certain direction. And people born without arms have even reported having phantom arms as well.

 

But there's more to phantom limbs than that. There seems to be a connection to the feedback of the senses -- people who have seen their arms paralyzed in a sling for many months before amputation experience their phantom arm as paralyzed and twisted up like it's still in a sling after amputation -- often it was painful the way it was twisted up, and the person was unable to do anything about it.

 

In these cases, Ramachandran had the amputees stick their real and their phantom limbs in a mirror box, which used a reflection of their real arm to give the illusion that they could see the phantom arm -- and being able to "see" the phantom arm allowed them to move it.

 

And that's what makes the these illusions work. If you're interested in a phantom tail or something like that, you should definitely check that link out.

[Vinderex]

I actually wear a scalemaille tail on a regular basis as part of a LARP outfit, and I can say that after wearing it for a long while, it starts to feel like an extra limb, and there's that sense that it actually moves with me even though it obviously doesn't. Even after taking it off, I still feel it as if it's still there. I would assume that imposing a tail would be able to give a similar feeling, just would require more mental focus since there's no physical part to work with.

[DewclawSilvertail]

Focus as much as possible until focusing becomes automatic. Similar to how at first your tulpa is only around when you focus on them, I guess. I dunno. The wings started as a daydream thing and then I realized I was accidentally imposing and then eventually after focusing almost constantly it became automatic.

 

hey there I am new to this forum and I am looking for some awnsers to my questions.

 

I saw this thread after reaserching this Phantom Tail syndrome thing because while I have been studying at school I have started to notice that when I am walking around at home or at school I feel like I have a tail, now this probably sounds weird but I see you guys here are used to that type of thing. I need to know weather this is apart of this phantom tail thing,  I cannot see the tail, but I can certainly feel it. am I going mad or is this something to do with this.

 

btw I am a apart of the furry fandom if this makes any effect on what I am experiencing (it shouldn't but I don't have a clue what is happening)

[Tasio]

Focusing on having a body part you don't actually have tends to have that effect. If you think of yourself having a tail, you'll feel like you have one. This happens when I am up front in the body, as my form has a tail.

[tulpa001]

Phantom tails are relatively common in the furry fandom. Here, we usually get them from switching and such. It doesn't have much to do directly with tulpas.